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Friday, October 5, 2012

Diary of a Lead-User

Lead-Users live in the future, which makes them
both invaluable to understanding where an industry is headed, but so difficult
to describe to those of us who are living in the present.

I truly believe that Eric von Hippel’s great gift
to students of innovation – the concept of the Lead-User – is one of the most
important elements of the “new innovative thinking” that we are seeing all
around us. Yet, it is also one of the most difficult of concepts to get across
to busy executives who have been browbeaten into an allegiance to everything regarding customer centricity to the point where anything that the customer
says is taken as “truth.” In fact, the
customer is as confused about the future as we all are, and, consequently,
highly unreliable as a source on which to base significant long-term decisions.
That’s where lead-users come in!

I think about this a lot because it is difficult to
come up with meaningful examples of lead-users that are neither sports-related nor
“otherworldly,” but this morning I woke-up and found that I was, myself, a
lead-user!

It all started with an article in this morning's
Financial Times regarding a British manufacturer of interactive white boards,
which has lost 90% of its IPO value since it listed on the London exchange in
2010: http://on.ft.com/PBhsmL The article quotes an analyst as
saying: “The company has failed to grasp just how bad
things are…. It’s own take on the market has been seriously wrong.” I think that this is both accurate, and a bit
unfair. What we are seeing here is disruption in real-time, in front of our
very eyes, and it illustrates just how difficult it is to protect yourself from
such surprises. In fact, this is yet again another instance of sloooowprise, and the amazing thing is
that no one seems to recognize this.

I have seen several big investments be made in interactive
white boards at various schools in the past, and I’ve also noted that for the
last several years – years; this is a long time! – nobody uses them anymore. They’ve been
disrupted by mobile phone cameras, of all things, where the participants write
on non-interactive flip charts and white boards, snap a photo of their work,
and email it to the professor who then displays it on the screen in the front
of the room. A solution that is much simpler than the complicated, never really
user-friendly, interactive technologies, and much cheaper as well! A solution, incidentally, that has been
proposed by lead-users such as myself who are eager to have their students focus
on their work without being frustrated by the “only-occasionally interactive”
white boards.

I’m sure that no one in the interactive white board
industry ever thought that they would be disrupted by mobile phones, just as
the overhead projector folks never saw interactive white boards coming, either.
To say, as the analyst did, that the company in question’s “take on the market
has been seriously wrong,” is, of course, correct, but unnecessary. I’m equally
sure that the analysts assessing the IPO never saw this disruption either, but by
2010 it was already in full-swing.

Of course, no one that I know of who is actually working
in these classrooms was ever asked about what was going on either! And, that’s where
it turns out the lead-users were living.

One final thought: not surprisingly, the company in
question has a completely different perspective: “Over the longer term, the impact of interactive learning
technology is proven and this, coupled with the development of our integrated
software and hardware strategy, means that [we] remain well positioned
to benefit when market conditions improve.”
Well, they’re wrong! The end for
interactive white boards has already arrived. Thanks to mobile phones, the
technology that they offer is now unnecessary. It has been disrupted by
something cheaper and more accessible and the solution is better. This is how
disruption unfolds, and the recognition of what is happening turns out to
always be a lagging indicator for the industry incumbents, as they are never
speaking with lead users.